Great post and advice! My line of work is online marketing and search engine optimization so searching for info is my first action when coming to this site. I'd like to suggest to posters, users, and LIweddings.com owners that we make it easier to search and to find info on the boards. Here are some ideas about how we can do this...
Website Users:
1. when doing a chat search enter your search term(s) (AKA search query) multiple ways. For example giorgio's and giorgios return different results even though the only difference in the search term is the apostrophe mark.
2. when posting a comment or reply add 'tags' to your post that will make searching eaiser. These 'tags' are just terms that will help the search feature find your content, like in the search query mention above. For example, if I post the question, 'What hotels are near Giorgio's?' I would use the following tags, 'giorgio's, suffolk hotels, hotels near giorgios, hotels in suffolk county'.
LIweddings.com owners:
1. create a 'how to search' tutorial and link in header, footer, and under quick navigation drop down on chat page. Include instructions on boolean search, search modifiers, and search operators.
2. include tagging functionality and features for forum posters. This will help to generate more searchable content for on-site search functionality.
3. replace basic .NET on-site search function with a more robust tool. Google's Site Search is excellent and very inexpensive.
4. improve search effectiveness by making search function less sensitive to 'stop' words like in, on, the, a, etc. Example, searching Chat using 'suffolk photographers' or 'photographers suffolk' results in 0 posts. However, 'photographers in suffolk' results in 1 post. Interesting note, none of these search queries result in any content when used in the generic search function in the header.
3. unite generic 'header search' function with 'chat search' function so they pull from the same database. Right now the generic search function only pulls from vendors, store, or other LIweddings.com generated content...it does not pull any user generated content or content from any of the forums.
I hope this post added some value and can help everyone find the info they're looking for. To follow my own advice I'm going to add the follow tags to this post....
tags: searching, search function, how to search, search feature, chat search
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